The seemingly relentless media focus on Israel and its associated bias carries with it a challenge for spokespeople to be able to present the facts about Israel in an oft-hostile environment. It was to this end that this past Wednesday evening, 5th September, the ZF hosted Eylon A.Levy who delivered the first of the ZF’s future Media Spokesperson training workshops.
Eylon is an investigative journalist and news anchor at i24news, the Tel Aviv-based global TV news network. Before that he was the anchor of IBA News, the English news on Israel’s public TV. He’s a graduate of Oxford and Cambridge and served in the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Unit. Last month he broke the story that Jeremy Corbyn took money from two Islamist groups to meet Hamas officials in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
With an audience of 40, Eylon delivered training on such elements as messaging, framing and delivery, using a variety of videos of interviews by UK media of people such as Benjamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni, Naftali Bennett and Saeb Erekat to illustrate techniques, as well as advising on the best way to deliver messages when being interviewed or speaking on radio. The evening culminated with a reenactment of a TV panel interview, with Eylon as the host, presenting Israel-related questions to the “panelists”.
